Free The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint Page B

holding so well and the slightest draft of air could easily make her fall all to pieces again.
    When Daniel finally leaves, I shut my eyes. I remember being surprised at how easily Sophie’s able to fall asleep, but I think I understand now. When you know that falling asleep lets you cross over, how can you not train yourself to drop off at a moment’s notice?
    One moment I’m the Broken Girl, lying in her hospital bed, and the next I’m myself again, whole and mobile, standing in the forest of forever. The cathedral woods. It’s only a dream, you say. And that’s true. But I don’t care because when I walk off under those giant trees, every breath I take is like food, sustenance for my soul.
    What I want to do is travel deep and deeper into the dreamlands, to find that place that I know is waiting for me here. My home. But I promised Joe I’d take it slow, that these little sojourns here are to catch my breath before I concentrate on the real work at hand: healing the Broken Girl. Then I can look for home. And I know he’s right. If my body dies in the World As It Is, I’ll be taken away from the dreamlands, too, heading off on that final journey that we all have to take one day. I don’t know what’s waiting for us when we die—something better, something worse. I only know I’m not ready to find out yet.

    So I take it easy. Today I’ve decided to go sketching.
    Before the accident, this is something I always made time for. Even when I might be too busy to paint, I’d work in my sketchbook, going out and drawing for no reason except for the pleasure of feeling the pencil rub across the paper, searching for the lights and darks with the graphite until the magic happens and recognizable shapes appear on the paper. I guess drawing’s something I’ve always taken for granted. Even when I was a kid, it was just something I did, like breathing. But I’m really paying attention to it now. I know a lot of the pleasure I’m feeling at this moment is from the simple fact of being able to do it. The Broken Girl can’t even pick up a pencil.
    I got my sketchbook and a nice Wolfe’s carbon crayon in Mabon. I still don’t know why I sometimes find myself there, sometimes here, in the woods. I wandered around the city for a long time, looking for Sophie or her boyfriend Jeck, but while I met a lot of interesting people, I couldn’t find them. I wonder about the people I meet. Do they originate in the dreamlands, or are they here like me, taking a vacation from their body? I haven’t asked because it doesn’t seem polite.
    The last time I crossed over, I decided to give up looking for Sophie for the time being. Mabon’s even bigger than Newford and Newford’s pushing six million by now. Since I don’t know my way around, finding Sophie feels kind of hopeless. I figure we’ll meet here when we do. And for now, well, I like Mabon, but the forest draws me more.
    The last time I found myself in the city, I tracked down an art shop where I got my sketchbook and pencil. I asked Jamie—the clerk behind the counter, according to his name tag, if he hadn’t switched it with a co-worker—if he could tell me how to get from Mabon to the cathedral woods. He liked that name for them. Even in the dreamlands, which is such a cathedral world in itself, that forest is something special again.
    â€œThis works sometimes,” he said, leading me to the back of the store.
    We were in the store’s shipping/receiving room, everything in a clutter the way it so often is in the parts of a store that are hidden from the view of the general public. Jamie reached for the handle of a door set in the wall on the far side of the room and opened it, but there was only an alleyway there.
    He closed the door and turned to me.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot to tell you that it helps if you’re
expecting it to